Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | John Reid

A “Sound Unwrapped” programme, featuring Aurora Orchestra's trimmed line-up of five musicians and one sound engineer on electronics, proves to be an absolute success. 

Das Lied von der Erde may have been down-sized but it lost none of its stature in the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of a chamber arrangement of Mahler’s great song-symphony.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, goes the familiar phrase, and that can be applied in life to any number of things, including music. Were the father of harmony, Johann Sebastian Bach, still alive today, he would be beyond flattered.

When I collected my ticket for this evening’s Late Mix concert in Hall Two of The Sage Gateshead, I was somewhat surprised to see it marked as unreserved seating. A computer glitch, I thought, until I walked into the hall and found that the usual rows of seats in this small, in-the-round auditorium had been replaced with café-style tables and chairs.

You are sitting in the choir stalls of the Royal Festival Hall, watching the ceramic artist and writer Edmund de Waal address you, his back to an enormous sea of empty, grey, imposing seats. He is delivering a vivid narrative account of a day in the life of a young aristocratic Jewish boy in early 20th-century Vienna.

Harry Christophers brought his Sixteen to Manchester for a night of deeply romantic choral music at The Bridgewater Hall. Brahms’ Deutsches Requiem was a foreseeable success, but the seldom-heard Vocal Quartets, settings of Sternau, Schiller, Daumer and Goethe, were a delightful addition to the programme.The first set of Brahms quartets, Op.

The final concert in Northern Sinfonia’s summer chamber music series followed the pattern of the first two, sandwiching a lesser-known piece between two staples of the chamber music repertoire, and giving different groups from the orchestra the opportunity to step forward.

Early Romantic symphonies lie at the core of Northern Sinfonia’s orchestral repertoire, and so to hear different groups of their players getting together with pianist John Reid to perform chamber music by Schumann and Brahms seemed like the most natural thing in the world, an intimate, scaled-down version of one of their regular concerts.

In her opening words to this evening’s presentation of Kathleen Ferrier’s life and letters, Diana Moore said that Ferrier was an inspiration to every mezzo-soprano or alto who came after her, and despite its flaws, this concert was clearly a heartfelt tribute to a truly great singer, by one who has learned from her.